Finals and Unfortunate Events - Week 9

    An unfortunate event has occurred, my laptop has broken. However I have found a temporary replacement. The main issue, however, is that my files have all been lost :( . Always save important notes on a flash drive. My exercises, labs, and assignments to review are now gone. As well as my notes for other classes. Otherwise, I guess re-doing every assignment, exercise, and lab would be great review?

    Topics to review immediately however would be memoize, maps, and properties. I find properties to be something really nice and reminds me of rewriting operators like in c++. It really seems useful for making classes work together, comparable, addable, etc. Maybe even makes lists that you can add elements to with a simple + sign. Memoize is quite a clever way to reduce computations within a function, it helps me see now what exactly the purpose of a cache is. Although I wonder how this would be done outside of python without dictionaries, are there similar built in data structures or would we make our own? I can't think of any in Java off the top of my head. Reduce mapping seems like a really simple and quick shortcut to computing the sum/multiplication/reduction of a list of things, rather than using built in functions or making your own. It also is another way to potentially save memory, like caches!

Properties and Reductions - Week 8

    This week we discussed the built in properties and map reduce. Properties allows us to change how variables are assigned, retrieved, and deleted from a class. Essentially it allows us to dummy-proof a class so that someone can't break it by only accepting certain inputs like with regex tree nodes. In class we haven't had to do something like this because we expect certain types of inputs, but outside in the real world we should account for things like this when working with other people.
    Map reduce just seems like a nice built in function to use for quick computing of lists. The lab brought us back to sorting efficiency's, showing how much a few lines of code can effect the number of operations in the long run. It also showed how with the number of elements in something being sorted, a type of sort may be better at the start but much worse at the end.

Where did all the days go? - Week 7

    Haven't made a post in quite a while, so I'll reminisce about the past assignment: regex trees. Parsing regex trees was quite straight forward however matching proved to be a challenge of trials and errors due to edge cases. It came down to correct ranges in the end for the troublesome star nodes. Edge cases like (e*|1)* were troublesome, creating infinite loops. Results show all the auto-marker test cases worked however I assume TAs will try to break the code and go over the documentation.

    In preparation for the test I have done what Danny said to do in class, gone over the past labs, examples in class, assignment, and past exercises. I still feel somewhat unprepared, it is probably from the pressure of the new CS subject post requirements.

Run Times Means Fun Times! - Week 5

    CSC165 and CSC148 are overlapping! Everything in CS relates to Big-Oh, but I honestly find it a bit confusing. I suppose thinking of it in a more broad scope would help, rather than the bounds being of the functions themselves they are of the growth of the functions. No matter what you do to n with constants, it still will grow at a similar rate as another n if it is multiplied by constants. It's nice to see the sorts we've learned having a more measurable concept of efficiency, n, logn, etc.

Trees, Binary, Tuples. - Week 4

    Binary trees are very interesting with all their applications, like the ability to use nodes in a queue and such. The exercise was quite straight forward, with the exception of part b in which I kept getting lists within my node lists but a simple list comprehension solved my problem. I managed to solve the exercise without helper functions thanks to tuples, something that I was introduced to this year as I had programmed in java. The usefulness of tuples has actually become very apparent now, it really simplifies things when I can return a small tuple.

Testing Shenanigans and Binary Trees - Week 3

    Today I had my first mid-term, which was CSC148, it taught me that I need to really get back into my test-taking habits. First of all: read the question carefully. The number one rule that I apparently forgot, when glazing over i ** 2 my brain thought, "Oh! i multiplies 2" rather than "i to the power of 2". And of course not diving into a question but rather thinking about how to solve it, because the latter in the long run wastes less time.

    For indentations I've developed the habit of pressing four spaces. Thank you python! With trees and their preorder, postorder, and inorder everything seems to revolve around recursion. While I learned how to make these trees from simple input, I never really learned how to make trees from the preorder and postorder. Quite an interesting task, it required much more thinking and pen and paper than typing. Ever since my first difficult computer science assignment (the tour of Anne Hoy) I've been thinking things out first on paper as it really does help. It has shown me that in the end, everything boils down to recursion when it comes to trees. Recursion is great, when you understand it.

Object Oriented Programming and Recursion - Week 2

    I have found object oriented program to be a lot more enjoyable than non object oriented as I first learned programming in Java, the instant feedback of what I have programmed is very gratifying and helps me as I learn better when I see things happen. The goal is to become a human python visualizer. Creating classes feels at home as in java I always had to make classes.

    Recursion has proven to be a very useful programming technique that shortens the length of code drastically. In general the compact form of recursion is very nice to be able to write, however it can sometimes be very confusing and take a while to think through step by step. The best way to judge it is by just going through a case.
    For example, with the lab this week the binary notation function we had to create was quite difficult to understand until I went through a case with it, realizing that a base algorithm would work when the binary expression is put back in shorter and shorter.